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What to do with an old iPad

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

This Hacker News discussion centers around the utility and potential of old iPads, primarily focusing on the frustration with Apple's ecosystem control and the desire for greater user freedom.

Vendor Lock-in and Lack of User Control

A dominant theme is the frustration with Apple's proprietary ecosystem, which users feel prevents them from fully utilizing their own hardware once it's no longer officially supported. The inability to install alternative operating systems is a major point of contention.

  • "This makes me so angry. I have an ipad mini - a wonderful piece of hardware that can do almost nothing useful now, as OP indicates. I would love to run my choice of OS on it and not landfill the device. Instead Apple controls it, like I never owned it." - imglorp
  • "Why do I need to 'jailbreak' my own hardware? Why do we put up with this madness? There should be allowance for accessing my own hardware, especially 13 year old hardware abandoned by the vendor and locked for the user." - imglorp
  • "Apple needs to step TF out of the way. They sold this hardware, they got their money. Move aside and let people use what they bought." - wpm
  • "I am in the same boat. I have two ipads, one is probably ipad mini 2 if I remember it correctly and another one is the first ipad pro. Ipad pro is still usable but not fully functional because I cannot upgrade the os and many apps dropped support for old os. Ipad mini on the other hand is totally unusable." - sbinnee
  • "I wish Apple would just unlock these things once they stop supporting them. It's such a waste of hardware otherwise." - pmarreck
  • "It's probably more because some IT people at Apple take pride in locking things down. After that, it takes Apple real effort to actually support your use-case." - amelius

The Case for Re-use and the Environmental Impact

Several users lament the waste of perfectly functional hardware and express a desire for greater longevity and reusability. This is contrasted with Apple's recycling services, which are seen as a less desirable alternative to actual reuse.

  • "Recycling is strictly worse than reuse, and that's even assuming apple does good recycling." - jraph
  • "Apple should open their tablets after they stop supporting them." - esafak
  • "The hardware could absolutely be made useful too. For example Apple could have a decent low bloat long term support OS that can be deployed on a device. Maybe it doesn't have all the bells and whistles but who cares, at least it would be usable. They won't do this though because it makes them no money." - curvaturearth

The Potential of Alternative Operating Systems (Especially Linux)

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around the possibility of running alternative operating systems, with Linux being the most frequently mentioned candidate. However, technical hurdles and the lack of vendor support are significant challenges.

  • "I'm with you here. I think Apple should let you install whatever OS you want in the device after the support cycle ended. But that's not gonna happen any time soon. Until then, we jailbreak." - owenmakes
  • "There's no reason Linux couldn't run on M1 iPads, aside from the fact the bootloader isn't unlockable like on macbooks." - retr0id
  • "No OS exists because everyone knows it couldn't be installed in the current status quo. Why would anyone do the work of porting $OS to old iPads if they knew it was fruitless? How could they even do it?" - wpm
  • "There aren't because non-x86 computers are really poorly standardized. Most x86 PCs probably are capable of natively booting MS-DOS for an IBM 5170 PC/AT but iPhone 17,1 and iPhone 17,2 run completely different images. Efforts like PostmarketOS have no chances of success when literally everything is model subtype specific." - numpad0
  • "I would love to run Linux on my old iPad hardware. The newest iPad Pro running Linux would probably be faster than my current laptop." - jmpman
  • "Linux on iPad (ipadlinux.org)" - fsflover
  • "I remember Cloudflare's job was to cache the page back in the day.. is it still the case?" - zb3 (This comment, while seemingly off-topic, relates to the technical challenges of hosting and the underlying infrastructure, which is relevant to running alternative OSs on old hardware.)

The "Network is the Computer" and Remote Interaction Protocols

The discussion touches upon the historical concept of "the network is the computer" and the evolution of remote interaction protocols, drawing parallels between classic X11/NeWS and modern web technologies.

  • "Networked X11 was a killer app back in the workstation days. 'The network is the computer,' was totally true in practice. With the rise of Wayland, I feel like we're due for a new networked interaction protocol, maybe rising from the ashes of X and also NeWS." - imglorp
  • "I think the arcan project is doing good work here. But honestly I suspect the days of networks attached displays is slowly coming to an end. Our modern alternative is probably the web, where you ship the program to the display server to run on it." - somat
  • "Unfortunately, as far as old iPads are concerned, one of the major issues with old iPads is the old safari version. And so old web standards. I've this potentially nice projects to mirror screens from the web browser, but they won't run on old iPads for this reason. Shipping programs to the old iPad will suffer the same issues: only programs specifically written for these old Safari versions will work." - jraph
  • "Oh man it was fucking great. I had a shitty pentium or mmx, with fuck all ram, my dad however had a DUAL PROC P3 monster just a network hop away. I could SSH in and run GIMP on his machine and run resynthesizer in a quarter of the time. But that time has passed now. Perhaps web APIs are the best way to do that kinda offload." - kaiserpro
  • "It was amazing. Multiple applications running on different servers/machines all working side-by-side on a single desktop workstation. Effectively every GUI application could automatically be run in 'client-server mode' (using the terms in the traditional sense not the inverted-X11 sense) without having to write any architecture or OS specific client code. Although technologically completely unrelated, rich browser applications also fill this niche, and even share warts like the lack of standardized UX behaviors or having issues with dealing with (subtle) difference between "client environment" implementations (different browsers or X11 "servers"). Effectively the web browser became the universal 'graphical terminal' in the same way as (in the past) serial TTYs were the universal 'textual terminal'. Thus X11's 'killer app' just slowly became irrelevant." - derriz

Battery Life and Physical Degradation Concerns

Some users discuss the practical challenges of using old devices, particularly concerning battery health and the potential for "spicy pillows" (swollen batteries).

  • "Wouldn't 'spicy pillow' be the main problem with old iPads? My iPad Air 4th gen doesn't have an option to limit charging to 80% etc." - clumsysmurf
  • "Good point. My old iPad's battery is still lasting very long, but I don't know how it would behave if it were indefinitely plugged." - jraph
  • "I keep mine unplugged and it gets surprising good battery life, and I think it kinda improved with the downgrade. On normal use I would get like 8-10 hrs screen on time. No spicy pillow yet, though I did have that issue with my old iPod." - owenmakes
  • "Then you're lucky. I had iPad 2 and Air 1. Older one is completely dead for 5 years now and doesn't react to plugged cable at all, while newer charges whole day and keeps battery for 4-5 hours." - pndy

The Complexities of Jailbreaking and Obtaining Software

The process of jailbreaking and installing software on older devices is highlighted as being difficult, often involving questionable websites and Apple account requirements that can be hard to meet.

  • "The good thing is that you can do all this jailbreaking with free software from Linux, apparently. Of course it's endless browsing shadier and shadier / scammy websites before finding something that looks somewhat less shady. The world of iOS jailnreaking is very strange. The bad thing is that sideloading requires an Apple account. I don't have one. Creating an Apple account from the device is not possible anymore. Creating an apple account from the apple website seems complicated. It wants a phone number which I'm not willing to give." - jraph
  • "I'd be happy to make it useful for something else but on the end, I have other things more interesting to do than to deal with Apple's bullshit. Too bad." - jraph
  • "I'd love to run Linux on an M1 iPad." - jmpman
  • "I'd love to run Linux on my old iPad hardware." - jmpman
  • "I'm surprised UTM wasn't mentioned here. Depending on the version of iPad, you may be able to get UTM SE on it, which will let you run a virtualized operating system on it. [UTM Link] - There appear to be some jailbreaks too - iSH would let you install and run local linux packages" - j45

Hardware Capabilities and Niche Uses

Despite limitations, users discuss ways they are successfully repurposing old iPads for specific tasks, such as serving web pages, acting as status displays, or as media players.

  • "So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means my server is working, and that this site is being served by an iPad 2 from 2012, running iOS 6.1.3 and Insomnia to keep it connected to Wi-Fi." - nugzbunny
  • "I do use a VPN, but I have torrented many, many terabytes of, errr, Linux ISOs. I haven't ever gotten so much as a nastygram from Verizon, and I still appear to get pretty close to advertised speeds." - tombert (While not about iPads, this relates to user freedom and the ability to push the limits of their hardware and ISP agreements.)
  • "I use an old IPad as a desktop status panel. Shows me timers, today's agenda, countdown to meetings and some to-do notes. A little focus/productivity tool." - edoceo
  • "I'm still using an OG Gen1 64GB iPad for movies/etc when traveling. The battery does just fine and easily survives watching a full movie or two." - acquacow
  • "i'm reminded of this story [iPhone 8 OCR Server Link] 83,418 OCR requests processed over more than a year of operation Up to 1,000+ requests on busy days If you forget about the million other ways to try and solve this issue. It’s an amazing repurposed piece of tech." - social_quotient

The Challenge of Hardware Standardization for Linux

The lack of standardization in non-x86 hardware is identified as a major barrier to porting operating systems like Linux, making each device model a unique challenge.

  • "There aren't because non-x86 computers are really poorly standardized. Most x86 PCs probably are capable of natively booting MS-DOS for an IBM 5170 PC/AT but iPhone 17,1 and iPhone 17,2 run completely different images. Efforts like PostmarketOS have no chances of success when literally everything is model subtype specific." - numpad0